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Serenity Screenings Sell Out
DizzyEllie writes "Last Wednesday, Universal offered fans of Joss Whedon's Serenity the unique opportunity to screen an unfinished version of the movie in ten cities. This was originally intended to pull both fans and non-fans into the fold, but the screenings sold out so quickly (less than a day for all cities to sell-out, but reportably just a few minutes in a couple of locations), it is clear that only the hard-core fanbase will make it in. This seemed to be completely unexpected by Universal, as ads were appearing in newspapers after the sell out, and incentives for the fans to promote the screenings were removed. The screenings will be held in 10 cities on May 5. Serenity: The Official Movie Website" Definitely a unique promo thing. Shows serious stones too- I mean, if the movie sucked, they wouldn't dare do something like this. Hopefully someone will post a review for us on wednesday. And the rest of us suckers have to wait until September. Bah.
Take any movie of any size and have screenings in 10 cities. It WILL sell out. With ~300M people and lets say 1000 seats, it is not hard to find a few people excited to see it.
Doesn't this suggest (I didn't say prove, just suggest) that they're making the movie by committee with focus group data?
I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Most good movies are more organic -- they're the result of someone's vision, expressed with comparatively small amounts of interference.
But then again, I'm already planning on not going to the last Star Wars movie, so I'm out of step.
Nah, it's actually pretty good.
They gave it a Friday night, 8pm slot.
They seriously under-promoed it.
Then they showed the episodes out of order.
Then they pre-empted it several times for baseball.
Then they decided to pull it.
And, lest you think this is just fanboy BS:
They released the DVD set. It reached amazon's top 5(10? something like that) in a matter of days. That's selling like Star Wars.
It is very unusual to show to a general purchasing audience. Usually test audiences are culled from standard test groups and are targetted demographics. They will be doing that also.
I suspect that this is a new interesting marketting attempt. They get paid to show the movie in advance to a small group. That will raise interest in the film and awareness a bit. It is not even free marketting as the fanbase will pay for this. I seem to recall a couple other instances of this sort of thing, but they are rare.
I seriously doubt they would do this if they did not think they had something though. A lot of the flamebait on here is blathering about the fanboy base and *nobody* flames a franchise more than an upset fanboy.
A test audience signs non-disclosure agreements. They *want* people to talk about this. Not quite viral marketting, but they definately think that word-of-mouth will sell this. Since their dvd sales were pretty much all word-of-mouth and sold about 5 million set to date, there is a certain logic to that.
If the movie sucks, then this is early enough that they can change it.
Given that a lot of the Firefly episodes were written/directed by Joss, I'm not sure how he was trying to do an impression of himself.
I agree that the trailer is formulaic. That was a marketing strategy to pull in the mainstream "i want to see shit explode" audience.
But the show itself is not formulaic. It subverts a lot of different "sci-fi" and even TV-series-in-general expectations. No vinyl-clad halloween-esque aliens with more make-up than my dead grandfather, no scantily clad crew members who have no real business being scantily clad (Inara's a Companion. Dressing beautifully is part of her job description. and she's never scantily clad anyway), the dialogue is FUNNY and entirely character driven... and the characters are complex rather than based on single opposing traits.
In the "literary" sense, the series really doesn't belong on mainstream tv at all because that's not the kind of thing that gets played on mainstream tv.
Buffy had a fanbase because it had pretty faces, yes. But this series has a fanbase (much bigger and with a higher average IQ than the buffy fanbase) because it's a GOOD series.